Brick House Java Bean Question

Dale Seng

Ranch Hand

Posts: 275

posted 11 years ago

The (unexpected) output is:

Here's the code, which can speak for itself, I think.

I think I see that because "this.chest = chest;" is really "this.chest = new String(chest);", it means that my reference that's in the array is pointing to an old copy. Fine. Weird, but fine. Now, how does one deal with it? I thought of:

But that's not very nice now, is it?

This is one of those "there must be a better way" things (without removing the key concept here: the array of attributes). They all might not be String objects, by the way.

I'm not sure why you think this is "not nice"; there are two ways to fix your code, and this is one of the two. It's actually the less preferable one, but I could live with it if you had special requirements.

The other one is to get rid of the arrays and loops and lists of names and such drek, and just have

The version with the arrays and loops is just plain nasty: hard to understand and hard to change. An awful lot of mess and overhead to introduce just to (presumably) avoid a bit of work in updating the "toString()" method if attributes are added.

Actaully, that way is just fine. That's the point of encapsulation -- it deosn't matter *how* it is implemented, the exposed methods (the getters and setters) will work. The inner workings is just a black box.